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Late to the party on this one, but as the running around killing oysters sojourn ends, want to rewind to the Moskin piece on Southern chefs that dropped a couple of weeks ago:

IT’S not hard to get Emile DeFelice riled up. Just mention Paula Deen, the so-called queen of Southern food, who cooks with canned fruit and Crisco. Or say something like “You don’t look like a Southern pig farmer.” He’ll practically hit the ceiling of his Prius.

Allow me to explain. If you consider the Socialist movement in the US in the early 20th c. and professional wrestling, the issue is clear. The most badly misread book in US literary history is Upton Sinclair's portrayal of an immigrant family being chewed up and spit out by capitalism, primariy in the form of industrial meat production. Folks read The Jungle, however, got grossed out by the rat shit in the potted meat, and ignored the larger message of the book, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, and transformed other folks' class/economic problems into their problems as consumers. What the Jungle lacks, in retrospect, is a villain. Here, perhaps, Sinclair could have taken some lessons from professional wrestling, where there is always a face and a heel.

Especially when Bourdain is beating the drums, Paula Deen emerges as the face of industrial meat. In other words, if artisan/heritage meat needs a villian to codify what it is and what it ain't, then Paula Deen makes a pretty good heel. To this end, here's an artist's conception of what it would look like if Paula Deen joined legendary wrestling crew the Moondogs. Thanks to The Artist Formerly Known As Penny Pascal for the peerless Photoshopping.

Via Google Alerts, the Cod saw where the St. Louis Post Dispatch had picked up on the Whole Hog kerfuffle. It's a curious piece. The thrust is "St. Louis native writes cookbook," but they do mention the issues w/ Smithfield and Caw Caw Creek Farm, documented here and elsewhere -- sort of:

"Summers also works as a producer, writer and stylist for journalistic and commercial clients. One of those, the multimillion-dollar international pork producer Smithfield Packing Co., helped to sponsor the publication of "The Whole Hog Cookbook." Some of the book's recipes specifically call for Smithfield products.

The sponsorship — and the subtle way it's revealed in the book — drew online rebukes from food bloggers and from Emile DeFelice of the small-scale heritage-pig specialists Caw Caw Creek Farm in South Carolina, whose animals are pictured in the book. Summers apologized to DeFelice after he commented on a post on the Gurgling Cod, a blog that took her to task. Soon thereafter, however, the controversy was fanned when chef and multimedia food personality Anthony Bourdain condemned the sponsorship from his @NoReservations Twitter account.

During the interview for this article, Summers singled out Caw Caw Creek as a great example of a heritage-breed farm."

This is how the story looked when I saw it this morning. Earlier in the piece, there had been a link to the cookbook itself. I emailed the author of the piece, asking "why you offered a link to Summers' own blog, but not to my post that raised the initial concern about the Smithfield connection, or Bourdain's tweet, or Eva Moore's article that fleshed out DeFelice's (quite legitimate) objection that Summers had taken pictures of his humanely raised animals to promote Smithfield's factory animals?"

Not long after, I got a pleasant response from Joe Bonwich, the article of the piece, who added these links:

"Summers apologized to DeFelice after he commented on a post on the Gurgling Cod, a blog that took her to task. Soon thereafter, however, the controversy was fanned when chef and multimedia food personality Anthony Bourdain condemned the sponsorship from his @NoReservations Twitter account.

During the interview.... etc."

On one hand, it's nice to be able to register a complaint w/ a major metropolitan daily, and have it acknowledged and fixed. On the other hand, there are issues that remain about what, when, and how this story says what it says.

The what is probably the least complicated -- the food pages of the St. Louis Post Dispatch are not exactly Woodward and Bernstein territory, but it's odd to see the issues with this book acknowledged and dismissed, rather than a) ignored b) discussed. Let's look at the key sentences:

"The sponsorship — and the subtle way it's revealed in the book — drew online rebukes from food bloggers and from Emile DeFelice of the small-scale heritage-pig specialists Caw Caw Creek Farm in South Carolina, whose animals are pictured in the book. Summers apologized to DeFelice after he commented on a post on the Gurgling Cod, a blog that took her to task."

Subtle? The book is not Smithfield branded on the exterior, but from the exhortations to buy pork from Smithfield in the preface, to the logos for Smithfield products on ingredient list, the effect is about as "subtle" as Jeff Gordon's relationship w/ DuPont. More importantly, Bonwich appears to miss the point of DeFelice's objection, which he spells out in his comment -- Summers used pictures of his humanely-raised animals to promote industrial feedlot pork. I do not know if DeFelice and Summers have had any communication via attorney, but Bonwich's mention that Summers apologized to DeFelice again misses the point that the book exists, and the apology does not undo or mitigate Summers's misappropriation of the images. Speaking of the materiality of print, that raises a whole other set of issues, which we can save for another post.

Thanks to Bourdain for sharing my reservations about a cookbook, and taking that conversation from the literally dozens of readers the Cod has to his considerably larger audience. A few things, in hopes of steering the conversation in positive directions:

1) The Smithfield cobranding is a major problem for folks who care about eating responsibly, but there is a lot to like in the Whole Hog Cookbook, and I'm looking forward to Libbie Summers's next project. She has a good eye and a good palate.

2) Given the circumstances as they appear, Emile DeFelice has every right to be furious that pictures of his farm were used to promote Smithfield-branded product raised under very different circumstances. Check out his farm here, and buy his pork here.

3) In the meantime, if you are looking for a Southern-inflected cookbook by someone who is serious about working with local producers.* Hugh Acheson is the man, and a New Turn In The South is the book. Cookbooks either codify (MTAOFC, Lee Bros), or extend (Momofuku, Zuni, most socalled ethnic cookbooks). Acheson does a bit of both and rethinks a lot of Southern verities -- with exciting results.

*When they stopped selling pigs at my day job, and I needed a pig, I called Hugh, and he told me where to go, which turned out to be near Ila, GA. It was in the shadow of a bucket loader w/ my pig dangling from it that I formed my theory that it is impossible to talk to a Georgian for more than five minutes before Michael Adams is mentioned unfavorably.

I'd run across Libbie Summers on the Twitters, and was looking forward to her book, The Whole Hog Cookbook -- nose to tail, heritage, etc., in a way maybe a trifle more accessible than Fergus Henderson. I was looking forward to seeing the book. And it's a handsome book -- interesting receipts, well articulated and well photographed. These virtues make the book's glaring liability all the more disappointing. The book begins by laying out Summers's assocations with hogs, and proceeds to a discussion of artisanal pork and runs through descriptions of heritage breeds. All very useful, and all very inspiring. And then:

"Armed with this information, you now have the luxury of being selective. But let's be honest. Let's be real. Not everyone has access to a corner butcher or farm that boasts heritage-bred and pasture-raised organic pork."

True enough. But, Summers continues:

"And that's okay, because you can still buy exceptional pork from a family run business at your local grocery store."

That family-run business? Smithfield. The notion that a cornerstone of the big ag meat oligopoly is somehow just like an organic/heritage/artisanal pork producer because it is not publicly held is the sort of late capitalist hallucination that would have Fred Jameson reaching for the smelling salts. What's more, the branding permeates the book, up to and including little logos next to trademarked meat products.

The Cod was pretty indignant at first. The idea that the difference between, say, a hog from Caw Caw Creek is to Smithfield meat products as, say, Cognac is to Armagnac puts the whole fautisanal enterprise in the shade. Summers works w/ Paula Deen, who shills for Smithfield. So, is The Whole Hog Cookbook a diabolical effort to coopt the heritage/artisanal meats movement for Big Ag?

In short, how do we read this cookbook? I read a bit, and this fall, have spent a bit of time with two chestnuts that constantly challenge the reader to decide how seriously to take them. The Whole Hog Cookbook is shorter than Moby-Dick, and more exciting than The Scarlet Letter, but like those books, we can't afford to dismiss the idea that as DHL said of Hawthorne's jawn, this is a colossal satire.

Nobody would write a book hailing nose-to-tail heritage pork, and then suggest that cryovaced loins sliced from factory hogs by harassed and beleagured assembly line workers are just as good. It would be impossible to take that book seriously. Summers is winking at us, cashing checks from Smithfield/Deen, and actually telling us that we need to find local and sustainable food, right? I sure hope so.

Eater says yes, w/lavish praise for th Pat LaFrieda iPad app. Some cool things in it, but spending money on proprietary device ($500-800), to enable the buying of an app ($6.99) that is basically a butcher's brand extension? I'd rather save my money for steak. Also, Eater links to one of its earlier posts on digital cookbooks: The headline there was "Is the future of cookbooks digital?" The link text to this post from the rave for the LaFrieda app was is "while future of cookbooks is inevitably digital" -- once again, the digital book allies are fronting like W in a on an aircraft carrier.

We've been over this before, several times, but there is new evidence that if you are a billionaire like Nathan Myhrvold, you can buy whole words, and not just vowels. I saw via Ideas In Food that they were talking about "modernist cooking" with Serious Eats. Eternal optimist that the Cod is, we clicked through, looking forward to a fritatta receipt from Ezra Pound, or perhaps even Vorticist gelato. Unfortunately, instead it's folks repeating the lazy mistake that Nathan Myhrvold made when he rebranded molecular gastronomy as "modernist cuisine" -- perhaps b/c of negative stereotypes associated w/ molecular gastronomy. It's fine, as long as you are not concerned with words and what they mean, which is ok, if you are in a non-verbal line of work. On the other hand, if you have just published a cookbook, or if you run a blog you want people to take seriously, all the digital scales in the world will not redeem sloppy and imprecise use of language. IIF's Tweets are inspiring, and I like what the SE crew does, but people who care about food and who care about language should be able to come up with a term that is not misleading and imprecise.

Against wisdom, hoping to take care of some cookbook business this week. Some good, some ugly. In any case, the Cod hopes to explore an idea that cookbooks either codify or extend your cooking repertoire. This binary, overlaid with an essential/inessential binary, creates four slots for cookbooks -- essential codifier (Joy), essential extender (Momofuku), inessential codifier (Bon Appetit) and inessential extender (Sous Vide with John Stamos).

But there is another series of choices. Do you release a book in book format, or as a DVD? Do your recipe demos feature bad boob jobs stuffed into camo bikinis? Is there archery in cutoffs? If you answered "DVD, Yes, Yes," then be forewarned that it's been done. Congratulations to noted herbivore Les Miles, and by way of hommage, we revisit the Only Cookbook That Matters:

Derp. In one analogy, (The Cod is no enemy of analogy, beetubs), this Glen Duncan fellow reveals his total incomprehnsion of literary fiction, genre fiction, intellectuals, dating, and sex work. And "hanky-panky pay dirt"? Is this a Playboy Advisor from 1970? And he drops "deconstruction" like Hilton Kramer had a column in Highlights. But the good news is that Colson Whitehead, consistently the best thing about Twitter, wrote a book with zombies. Fuck this guy in the Times, want you some Colson Whitehead zombie novel? Get you some.